Tech stacks

A rundown of the physical kit that I use every day.

Apple Macbook Pro

16" M2 Pro, 32Gb RAM.

It's a monster.

Logitech MX Keys for Mac Keyboard

Lovely office-friendly, full-sized keyboard.

Logitech MX Vertical Mouse

The most ergonomic mouse I've used.

Nothing CMF Buds Pro 2

Phenomenal noise cancelling earbuds.

AOC U28G2AE 4K 28" Monitor

4K HDR panel with 1ms response time.

Budget friendly too.

Some of the main software I use to research, design, build and manage 'stuff'.

Cursor

Running with Claude 4.5, pretty useful way of quickly RTFMing packages, libraries and aiding rapid development.

PHPStorm

Forever the most powerful PHP IDE. With Laravel IDEA built in now - game changer.

Firefox

Still the best web browser. Privacy respecting, AI kill-switch, fast, uBlock Origin still working and feature rich.

Vivaldi

Great browser with built-in support for Proton Mail/VPN/Calendar. Very nice.

Docker

Containerisation makes so much sense. Specifically using the (free!) Colima runtime.

Raycast

Excellent replacement for Spotlight on Mac, with a really powerful set of extensions for quick keyboard access to various tools.

TablePlus

Connect to data stores of MySQL, Postgres, Redis & more. Really solid, well-featured and presented app.

HTTPie

Lightweight tool for HTTP request library. Sometimes, Postman just feels too much!

Ghostty

This is when you know it's getting serious, when someone throws a Terminal app into their every day stack!

ObsidianMD

Powerful, extendable note taking app. Pairs nicely with my self-hosting stack.

Laravel Herd

Excellent app for local PHP development. Faster pure PHP performance than via Docker (on Macs).

MeetingBar

An in-menu bar calendar for MacOS, to see your day at a glance easily.

Affinity Design Suite

Well featured photo & vector design apps. Lifetime licencing too; stick it, Adobe.

PenPot

Open-source version of Figma, that I've started using for personal projects.

Whilst I'll always set out to use the right technology to drive any project, it's more than likely to be a combination of the following.

Laravel

The whole Laravel ecosystem, really!

Framework, Inertia, Eloquent, Collections, Pint, Blade, Facades, Queues, Notifications, Scheduling, Auth... Laravel solves so many problems.

AstroJS

Simplifies the clusterf*ck front end tooling has devolved into. Wraps around VueJS, React, Javascript, HTML, image compression & build tooling like Vite. Builds super quick sites, too!

PHP

Paired with Laravel, PHP has been the main language I've used throughout my career. Ideally 8.3+.

Tailwind

Utility-based CSS makes so much more sense once you start working with it.

I still can't remember all the class combinations though.

PHPUnit / Pest

Excellent testing frameworks for PHP.

MySQL / Postgresql

Whilst I've used MySQL more as the solid all-rounder, Postgres is similarly fantastic.

Docker

Everything gets built into containers for easy deployment to any environment.

SemaphoreCI

Unrivalled CI/CD provider, that I brought in at Visualsoft, and have never looked back.

GitHub

Whilst there are other Git platforms, GitHub just offer the complete package for version controlling code for organisations.

Go

Still early in my learning path with it, but I can see that Go is immensely performant and scalable.

Jira & Confluence / Plane & Docmost

The unholy duo that backs most tech-based projects for planning, organising and documenting. Alternatives like Plane & Docmost are great open source alternatives.

This website is probably my first foray into a personal website in around 15 years, so I wanted to be sure that the stack I chose to build it was future proof, offered a positive development experience and the tooling stack wasn't fighting against itself.

AstroJS

Great frontend architecture choice, that helps take away a lot of the bad development experience of the multitude of front end tooling.

TypeScript

Helps define object types, definitions and structures at runtime, meaning a component-driven website such as this one is always working with the data it expects.

Tailwind

Fantastic utility-driven CSS framework, with a great ecosystem and developer experience.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare Pages & Compute Workers come with fantastic free allowances. Hooks into GitHub to automatically deploy too, which makes me happy.

I have a nerdy hobby of self-hosting various services for personal or friends & family use. Typically for privacy or cost-saving purposes, but it's also been great for learning and plahing with new technologies I wouldn't normally get the opportunity to. This is the base tech that I'll run things from:

Docker Swarm

I love containers. Having a swarm of them, just sounds cool.

Ubuntu

Base operating system for each machine.

Cloudflare

Helps protect my home IP address, DDOS protection, external firewall & zero-trust tunnels.

Tailscale

Amazing mesh VPN that gives each machine or service a unique, private, web-accessible and consistent IP address.

USFF PCs

Ultra Small Form Factor PCs are typically former office machines, which have super low power consumption. Paired with SSDs & extra RAM, still have some grunt making them ideal for homelab cluster & servers.

Proxmox

Free VMWare equivalent, to manage virtual machines across a set of hardware nodes.